Time for Google to face up to its responsibilities

Date: November 19 2012

GOOGLE is the world's largest media company, though it looks radically different to other media companies. It has revenue of more than $1 billion a week and $50 billion a year. Its earnings surged 45 per cent in the past quarter, compared with the previous year. It has a profit margin of about 33 per cent after costs and taxes. These big numbers are reflected in Google's market value of $207 billion.

Google may be primarily a search engine but it is also an owner and creator of original content. As such, it is one of the largest publishers in the world, though not in the traditional sense.

It owns two global publishing ventures, YouTube and Google Maps. This year it acquired Frommer's Travel Guides. It owns a financial services publisher, a video producer, niche publishing ventures and last year acquired the Zagat restaurant guides.

The global scale of Google's operations - and the vast amount of material processed through its search engines - has led the company into a series of legal skirmishes over what it should and should not publish.

In the past two years Google has lost five lawsuits in four countries after being sued by people who felt aggrieved by what was tossed up by the Google search algorithms.

In each case Google argued it was not a publisher and therefore could not be held responsible for material it did not produce. In each case, the courts did not accept this argument. The latest adverse finding was in Australia and has potentially wide ramifications.

Last month, a jury in Melbourne decided that a man had been defamed by images found via Google even though Google had nothing to do with the creation of the photos. The problem for Google was that it was unresponsive after the man complained in 2009 that Google's search engine was causing damage to his reputation.

Last week the man, Milorad (Michael) Trkulja, was awarded $200,000 in damages by the Victorian Supreme Court Justice David Beach.

The judge said the defamation award was about ''nailing the lie'' that Trkulja had links to a notorious figure linked to Melbourne's criminal milieu. This guilt-by-association was caused by Google searches throwing up photos of Trkulja with the reputed crime figure.

Google's lawyers argued that the search engine was not the publisher of the damaging photos and used the ''innocent dissemination'' defence. The jury, and the judge, found this defence did hold once Google was notified that its search links were creating injury to the plaintiff's reputation.

During the past two years other courts in France, Italy and Japan have also found that once a complaint is made to Google it can no longer rely on the defence of passive innocence. It created and owns the logarithms which produce the search results.

Earlier this year, Google was fined the equivalent of $US65,000 by a court after its search engine suggested the French word for ''crook'' when users typed in Lyonnaise de Garantie, the name of an insurance company. Google ignored requests to remove the suggestion from its ''autocomplete'' search engine technology.

Last year, an Italian court found Google liable for defamation when its autocomplete search suggestions paired an accountant's name with defamatory keywords. The judge found liability did apply because the software that created these adverse links was created by Google. In a similar case last year, a court in Japan ordered Google to stop its search engine suggesting terms that linked a man's name to crimes he did not commit.

The common denominator in five adverse court findings against Google in the past two years is the company's refusal to respond to complaints.

With power comes responsibility. Google has made billions of dollars in profits from recycling other people's work. It creates and owns the intellectual property that drives its search algorithms. It is now a big publisher and media company.

With power comes responsibility. Google can afford to beef up its complaints departments and processes. It needs to - or it will face more and bigger defeats in the courts.

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